When so many people believe something, it is easy to go with the flow.
Photograph: Alamy

Our thought processes are not always clear or rational, and one reason for this is cognitive biases. These are thought processes that can alter how you perceive things and get in the way of making good logical decisions.

Psychologists have identified more than 100 thinking biases. These range from the quirky (the “Benjamin Franklin effect”, which states that once someone does you a favour they are more likely to do another favour for you) to the serious (the “pessimism bias” [pdf] – believing that bad things are likely to happen to you in the future).

Thinking biases happen in all areas of society, especially where there are lots of human interactions, pressure to perform, and where success and failure has to be measured and evaluated. These factors mean they can often occur in schools. But which biases might affect learning in our classrooms?

The Hawthorne effect

This is named after an experiment at the Hawthorne Factory in the US. Keen to find out how their staff could be more productive, the owners of the factory observed them. Knowing that they were being watched, the employees worked much harder and productivity increased. When they were no longer being observed, productivity returned to normal rates.

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This has some interesting implications for teacher observations, as it is difficult to give someone feedback on how they are doing if your mere presence alters how they act. Having regular low-stakes observation that focuses on feedback rather than judgement should go a long way to remedying this.

Likewise, if students are undergoing an intervention to improve a particular area and they know they are part of an intervention, it will probably impact their subsequent behaviour. This is why subtle and stealthy interventions [pdf] are likely to have greater impact.

The Ikea effect

Researchers have found [pdf] that people tend to place a disproportionately high value on the things they have helped create (such as Ikea’s flat-pack furniture). If someone has an idea, and has worked on it, they are more likely to cling to the notion that it therefore must be good.

This is similar to the “sunk cost fallacy” which describes how people make future decisions based on how much effort they have put in previously, as opposed to how fruitful they may be in the future.

In schools, this applies more to teaching staff than students – it can lead to failing strategies and interventions being prolonged longer than they should be. Teachers can protect themselves from this bias by remembering that just because something was your idea and you’ve put a lot of work into it, it’s not necessarily a good approach. Learn when to let projects go.

The bandwagon effect

This describes how you are more likely to agree with an idea if lots of other people already believe it. It’s easy to go with the flow. Individual decision-making and critical reasoning are put aside, as you assume everyone else has done the thinking for you. This partially explains why neuromyths are so common in education.

Awareness of this human tendency can help us harness it as a force for good. For example, a quirky study found that one of the most effective strategies to get hotel guests to re-use their towels (saving the hotel laundry costs) was simply to tell them that everyone else is already doing it. This is also the reason why some road signs now indicate what percentage of the population drive at the recommended speed limit, and not how many drive over it. Another example is the Most of Us Wear Seatbelts campaign in the US [pdf].

Teachers can benefit by actively highlighting and praising the group norms they want to see from their students, with a view to other pupils following suit.

Confirmation bias

This refers to the idea that people pay more attention to ideas they’ve previously agreed with. The confirmation bias is akin to starting with a conclusion and then looking for and finding evidence that proves it to be true. We may struggle to see what is actually occurring. A great example of this is the video below.

So if we were to label a student as disruptive, we’re more likely to pay attention to the times they misbehave (and sub-consciously disregard and forget the times they didn’t).

Students as well as teachers suffer from this one. In Daniel Willingham’s book, When Can You Trust The Experts, he details a study in which half a class of students was told that their supply teacher was “rather cold, industrious, critical, practical and determined”. The other half was told the exact same sentence, except the words “rather cold” were replaced with “very warm”. Students who had expected to be taught by a warm teacher rated the supply teacher as much nicer and funnier than those who were expecting them to be distant.

Labels at both end of the spectrum, such as “lazy” or “gifted and talented” not only potentially negatively impact how students see themselves, but also how others may view them.

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The Dunning Kruger effect

This describes how those less skilled at a particular task overestimate their abilities in relation to that task, while experts doubt themselves. Researchers David Dunning and Justin Kruger, who studied this, were inspired by the story of inept bank robber McArthur Wheeler. The thief believed that covering his face in lemon juice would make him invisible to the bank’s CCTV cameras. When arrested for this heist, he was baffled as to why it didn’t work.

In Dunning and Kruger’s subsequent study on student grades, they found that the biggest gap between perceived ability and actual results were in students in the lowest percentile. This is a real limit to student motivation, as why would someone be determined to improve if they already believe they’re better than they actually are?

Try to find the balance between helping students understand where they are while instilling belief that they can improve. Offer practical strategies on how to do so. Having high expectations that each student can improve no matter how well they did previously is a wise philosophy.

Blind spot?

Think none of these biases apply to you? Chances are you are suffering from the bias blind spot, which refers to the belief that other people are more likely to have these biases. But hopefully by knowing the most common thinking biases in education, you’re more likely to spot and overcome them. Or maybe I’m just suffering from the optimism bias.